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Friday Night Video-Some Wishful Thinking

Friday, March 25, 2011

It certainly does seem like years been it’s been clear. An ode to the coming Spring.

By the way, the video features, along with George: Ringo, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Elton John and Phil Collins. Not a bad collection of talent.


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Wisconsin Republicans learned from their favorite son

Friday, March 25, 2011

Joe McCarthy must be proud of his home grown emulators. The Wisconsin Republicans have launched a brazenly open witch hunt against a Wisconsin professor who dared to write an op-ed piece in the New York Times that they didn’t like. The GOP demanded access to his emails, in the hope that they could make a criminal case against him for misusing his university email account. McCarthy would approve.

The professor, William Cronon, appears to be hopelessly naive, in that he actually thought that if he wrote a thoughtful, well reasoned piece opposing this updated McCarthyism, the Republicans might back off, but he’s been disabused of that notion. Only Republicans would have the nerve to claim that opposing an obvious attempt to intimidate is undemocratic. Only in America in the 21st century could they get away with it. McCarthy wouldn’t just approve, he’d be jealous.


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Investigative Journalism at the Day

Friday, March 25, 2011

In today’s Day appears the second in a series of investigative articles. The first, which examined reaction in the boating industry to a proposed tax on boats, has now been followed by an equally hard hitting piece on the reaction among the folks who play with planes to a proposed tax on airplanes.

The results of the Day’s investigation are so surprising that I am still somewhat in a state of shock. It turns out that if you ask the people directly affected by a proposed tax whether it’s a good idea, they will tell you it isn’t, and they will have all kinds of facially reasonable explanations for their position. It’s even true that if you go out of your way to contact people who don’t really care, but would probably rather not pay the tax, they will express displeasure. For example, if you call some joker at Electric Boat, he’ll tell you that they will be “watching” the situation, even though such corporations would never really think of inconveniencing their corporate executives by making them drive a long distance to get on their private plane just to save a few bucks in taxes, which come out of the shareholder’s hide anyway. I, for one, could never have predicted any of this, so I must thank the Day for turning up this surprising bit of news.


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Money in spam

Friday, March 25, 2011

Yesterday I was the victim of an onslaught of spam comments. 61, all touting the benefits of a device or drug that promised to enlarge a certain portion of the male anatomy. Each was from a different IP address, so it was rather tedious work adding them all to my blacklist. It appears to have worked, as today I got only one from the same source.

I always wonder how much these people can possibly make from such an obvious scam. Well, someone has done a study. You can read about it here. The long and short: there is power in large numbers. If you send out enough spam, a tiny percentage of people actually respond; and a tiny percentage of them buy. But a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of a very large number can still yield some serious cash.


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Delivering lives of quiet desperation, one sucker at a time

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Today, as I was rambling through the internet, I came upon an advertisement for an institution of higher learning: Walden University.

At first I thought it must be a joke. Isn’t Walden the college for slackers made famous in Doonesbury? Indeed, it is, though in the comics the institution is, if I’m not mistaken, a humble college rather than a mighty university. And then, of course, there’s the connection to a former resident of Concord, Massachusetts.

I followed the link (which I will not provide here, so as not to increase their traffic) and found that, indeed, this learned institution does exist, it being one of corporate America’s latest devices to undermine the American way of life: the for-profit “educational” institution, designed to siphon off the maximum amount of federal student loans for the least amount of value in return. Naturally, this institution, like all such institutions, despite the fact that its name evokes the memory of the first American hippie, touts its MBA program.

In a just world, Henry’s literary executors would be able to step in and enjoin this perversion or Garry Trudeau would sue for trademark infringement. But alas, Walden University will be allowed to besmirch the pond, the poet and the comic college unmolested. But perhaps Henry should stop spinning in his grave. After all, the institution that stole his thunder may very well be responsible for creating hosts of ex-students who will, willingly or not, have to adopt his simple life style, as they labor to pay off the loans their former university was so helpful in helping them obtain.

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Report from Boston

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

We are in Boston at the moment. Some friends of ours got tickets to Hair, and we joined them here to see the show last night. We got here early yesterday, so I did a little exploring in the environs. The old Town Hall is across the street from our hotel, and I came across this two part sculpture in the forecourt. You can interpret it as you will, but to me there is only one reasonable interpretation.

The piece consists of this sculpture of a donkey:


Now, directly in front of the donkey a plaque is embedded in the ground. You can see a bit of it in the picture above. Here’s the whole thing:


So here we have, as always, the plodding donkey trying to get its work accomplished, impeded always by the trumpeting elephant, who, taking literally the Groucho Marx jest, announces “whatever it is, I’m against it.” The political message is obvious, to this politically obsessed mind at least. How this salutary message came to be erected on what I assume is a public space, I do not know, but I heartily approve.

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A bit of good legal news

Monday, March 21, 2011

Some good news to partially offset the fact that this allegedly bankrupt country is now raining expensive missiles on yet another country, with no clear explanation of what we expect to accomplish or how we know we’ve done so.

On Monday, a federal appeals court reinstated a key legal challenge to that surveillance: a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and others within hours of the FISA Amendments Act (.pdf) being signed into law. The lawsuit attacks the constitutionality of the legislation, which allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans without a probable-cause warrant, so long as one of the parties to the communication resides outside the United States, and is suspected of a link to terrorism.

Folks with memories might recall that Obama’s vote in favor of those Amendments was perhaps the first indication of the kind of president he would eventually be. He voted in favor, thereby giving the government and telephone companies carte blanche authority to spy on us without governmental accountability. The bill represented precisely the kind of compromise Obama seems to love. It was marginally better than the alternative, but not enough to really matter. As with so many of the compromises that Obama has arranged since, it started with the Democrats conceding almost everything as an opening gambit. I am not, by the way, saying that Obama was responsible for this compromise. He wasn’t-and he was. He didn’t negotiate it, but he backed off his promise to oppose it at a time (the summer of 2008, when he was already the party’s candidate) that his fellow Democrats might have followed his lead.

Getting back to the court’s decision, it is especially heartwarming to report that it is our own Second Circuit Court of Appeals that reinstated the ACLU’s case against the FISA Amendments. The case was thrown out by the lower court because the plaintiffs could not prove they had standing.

Standing is yet another of those legal concepts that make sense in the real world but become instruments of oppression when put to the service of the national security state. A person has “standing” to sue if he or she has suffered a legal injury as a result of the challenged conduct. To take an absurdly simple case: If John Doe slips and falls on my sidewalk, he can sue me, because he has been hurt as a result of my negligence. If Jane Roe, who wasn’t even there, but hears about the fall, decides to sue me, she lacks standing as she has not been harmed by my negligence. In the case of the wiretaps, of course, those who have standing may never know it. The court bought into the plaintiffs’ arguments that they were harmed because their justified fear that they were targets forced them to engage in expensive, evasive maneuvering to avoid the spies.

So, some good news, though the odds are good that the Supreme Court will reverse, or eventually agree with the government that if it claims it suspects someone is a terrorist, or knows a terrorist, or knows someone who knows a terrorist, or has heard of someone who knows someone who knows a terrorist, then it has sufficient cause to spy on them in every way it can conceive.


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A sign of hope

Friday, March 18, 2011

A bit of controversy about an SAT question, that read as follows:

Reality television programs, which feature real people engaged in real activities rather than professional actors performing scripted scenes, are increasingly popular. These shows depict ordinary people competing in everything from singing and dancing to losing weight, or just living their everyday lives. Most people believe that the reality these shows portray is authentic, but they are being misled. How authentic can these shows be when producers design challenges for the participants and then editors alter filmed scenes?

Do people benefit from forms of entertainment that show so-called reality, or are such forms of entertainment harmful?

When I read that many students considered this question unfair, I am somewhat ashamed to say that I figured it was because they thought the premise was unfair. But, much to my surprise and delight, the students weren’t upset because their misconceptions had been shattered, they were upset because the only test takers that could intelligently answer the questions were the very dolts that watched the shows. The question, in other words, was unfair because it was biased against students who had the good sense to read books, or at least watch more intelligent mass market offerings, instead of the dreck passed off as reality.

If it’s any comfort, and I know that it’s not, these students (at least the white ones), now know what it’s like to have to deal with a test that imposes cultural assumptions while allegedly objectively measuring intelligence or ability.

I remember reading about a test that was given to students in the state of New York that included a question that presumed a fairly high level of familiarity with the game of tennis, a familiarity that does not by any means cut across racial and class lines evenly, the Williams sisters notwithstanding.

Anyway, it is a sign of hope that so many students took exception to this question for all the right reasons.


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Sign me up!

Thursday, March 17, 2011

The same folks who launched a laughable effort to get Michelle Bachmann elected speaker of the House (a bit premature, but given the trends, her time will come) have now started a movement to draft her to run for President. Well, I just couldn’t get worked up about making her Speaker, but I’m 100% behind this effort.

Never in the history of this formerly great Republic have so many potential candidates been so obviously unqualified for the office they seek. Every mother’s son and daughter of them should run, and we can watch the spectacle of them all trying to out-crazy the other. With Michelle in the race, the bar will be set higher than even Sarah could manage. Pity poor Tom Pawlenty having to compete with those two! Obama may not be a great president, or even, alas, a good one, but he’s even luckier than his predecessor. When was the last time a president looked like a lock for re-election at the same time he was taking a do-nothing approach to dealing with a crushing Depression?


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Republicans don’t need no education

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Reality intrudes again. On yet another issue, the Republicans are wrong on each and every point they are making about one of their ginned up issues:

To improve its public schools, the United States should raise the status of the teaching profession by recruiting more qualified candidates, training them better and paying them more, according to a new report on comparative educational systems.

Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the international achievement test known by its acronym Pisa, says in his report that top-scoring countries like Korea, Singapore and Finland recruit only high-performing college graduates for teaching positions, support them with mentoring and other help in the classroom, and take steps to raise respect for the profession.

“Teaching in the U.S. is unfortunately no longer a high-status occupation,” Mr. Schleicher says in the report, prepared in advance of an educational conference that opens in New York on Wednesday. “Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership.”

Anyone who has ever sent their kids to school, and paid any attention to what teaching actually entails, knows all this is true. And yet, we are hearing on television, and from our politicians from the dark side, that it is all untrue, except that they agree that teachers are and should be treated like the scum of the earth. No small part of what is going on at the moment involves not just imposing financial harm. It goes beyond that, to humiliation. The goal is to render them powerless and to make sure that they know it. Of course, the ultimate objective is to destroy the public school system, so I guess it all makes sense. If you can’t afford to educate your child, why should the rest of us pay for it? What could go wrong if we create an uneducated generation or two?


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